This is another means for me to communicate, educate and participate within the Business Intelligence industry. It is a perfect forum for airing opinions, thoughts, vendor and client updates, problems and questions. To maximize the blog's value, it must be a participative venue. This means I will look forward to hearing from you often, since your input is vital to the blog's success. All I ask is that you treat me, the blog, and everyone who uses it with respect.

So...check it out every week to see what is new and exciting in our ever changing BI world.

A thought leader, visionary, and practitioner, Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert on analytics, business intelligence, and the architectures to support these initiatives. Dr. Imhoff has co-authored five books on these subjects and writes articles (totaling more than 150) for technical and business magazines.

She is also the Founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, a consortium of independent analysts and consultants (www.BBBT.us). You can follow them on Twitter at #BBBT

I wrote a blog on the demise of Western Union recently. If you remember, they charged by the letter for their telegrams. This lead to some interesting if not cryptic forms of communication. The best example I can think of was a farmer who sent a telegram to a fellow farmer that the bull he purchased was ready to be picked up. To save money, he sent the purchaser a telegram with a single word on it -- "Comfortable"... Think about, it will come to you.

Little did I know that this form of cryptic messaging would be rebirthed in an unusual and unpredictable fashion...

I just got back from Spring Break vacation with my family. I was amused that my daughter could not wait to get back in the US after a week out of the country. Why, I asked? "Because I need to talk to my friends", she responded. Huh?

OK -- I know instant messaging is popular. I use it all the time but I use my computer not my cell phone. Therefore I have access to a full keyboard and use English to communicate -- how outdated. Turns out that teenage girls in particular love using their cell phones to "chat". They have a language all to themselves due to the limited keypad. It mostly consists of consonants, abbreviations, shortened slang, etc. I peeked over my daughter's shoulder at her (now flattened) thumbs rapidly moving over her phone's keyboard as she communicated with her best buddy. The "conversation" went something like this:

So, I propose that we come up with a set of BI-related IM messages. I welcome your input on these. Come up with your own and post them... The funnier -- the better! As an incentive, I will send the person who comes up with the funniest or most unusual IM message one of our books for free. I, of course, will decide who the winner is -- blog prerogative. Here are a few of my own to get you started: